A gift from my Irish great grandmother

 My grandmother's lacy handwriting spells out the recipe for slim, or, as she noted, what her mother called potato bread. That little aside, the little evocation of her mother tells me that as she wrote, her mind's eye held a picture of her childhood home - the thatched roof, the great open hearth - and her mother, making magic out of potato and flour and fresh butter. 

A hundred years after that distant great grandmother kneaded potato bread, I'm doing it too. I wonder who she thought of when she lifted the golden slices from the pan - her own mother? My grandmother once told us about that lady, who experienced the potato famine. "She saw corpses on the side of the road, grass in their mouths," Nana told us, tears in her eyes, as we sat around the table. A horrible story, a terrible history, one that makes the slim struggle to go down.

She told me once about her father coming home from market. She and her siblings would race across the soft, long grass, and stand on stones, peering down the road. Her father would arrive with treats in his pockets, his hair shining in the sun. Inside, her mother rolled out potato bread and put sausages over the fire.

The first time I made slim myself, I was living in Zambia. I was homesick, and thought I'd try, and my friends were brave and willing to taste it. I didn't know how to make it, but there were potatoes and flour aplenty, and we made butter from the thick cream we skimmed off the milk that was delivered fresh from a nearby farm. So we boiled and mashed and mixed and hoped and fried, and finally found ourselves eating crisp golden slices of soft potatoes. 

I cried. It tasted like home.

Since then, I've made it in every kitchen I've had. The tiniest galley in our first apartment, the camp-kitchen we lived in for years when our contractor ripped us off, our current big oak kitchen... 

It always tastes like home.

How to make "slim" -- or as she called it, "potato bread."

Mashed potatoes and salt to taste.

Enough flour to make a manageable dough.

Roll out to 1/2 - 3/4 " thick. Fry in buttered pan til brown on one side. Turn & brown on other side. Eat hot with butter on top or with bacon, eggs, & sausages.